The Lights of Sereitei
by Kuroi-cho-tsuki-shiro
Summary: Rukia and Renji are different. In a world without hunger, they search for food. In a city built on memory, they remember nothing of a life before this one. A series of shorts based on the story of Bleach from Rukia's point of view. 16
1. Chapter 1

Inuzuri, in the Seventy-Eighth District of Rukongai, was no place for children. In the summertime, heat collected in the streets, like shit in the gutters, and the air tasted of the sweat and blood of its inhabitants. No-one here knew why they were here. The dead were not at liberty to question their fates. Their places were decided the day they were born into Soul Society and assigned to a district of the Rukon. The souls of Inuzuri were thieves, murderers and thugs. Perhaps they had been different in life, but in this world, the rot of one spread swiftly to the masses, for death had offered them no justice and no answers.

They remembered their lives; they regretted their mistakes; they longed to live again.

And that had been the first difference.

It was the one that Rukia had felt the most keenly. She had been born onto the streets of Rukongai; she wasn't certain of when and she wasn't certain of how she had survived, but her earliest memories were those of dusty roads and tumble-down buildings and her footsteps dragging in the gutters. She was always hungry; she was always thirsty. And she had always had questions.

All those she met had partaken of a mysterious thing: life. They talked of it, yearned for it; they spent hours gazing into a past that she could only guess at. They didn't need to eat or drink. Some didn't even sleep. Yet she did, and she had no memories at all of a time before.

She was a scavenger. She lived on her wits and her speed, avoiding confrontation whenever possible. She had to eat though. And, to eat, she had to steal. Food was an indulgence for most: a luxury, but not a necessity. It sold on the street for high prices, but the traders did not understand hunger. When they caught her, if they caught her, they beat her. And it was from them that she learned to fight; from them that she learned to be cautious with her trust. From them that she learned she was different and could be punished for it.


	2. Chapter 2

She was crouching on a flat roof. She was hungry, and she had been hungry for two weeks, ever since the boats had failed to come down the river, leaving the market stalls devoid of their usual goods. The crowds were complaining, but only because they could not treat themselves to sugared sweets or meat steamed in its fats. It was different for her. The hunger made her ill, and two weeks was the longest she had gone in living memory without a bite to eat.

She was watching a pack of children in the street below. 'Pack' was a good word for them; they were scrawny and dust-coloured, just like the dogs of Inuzuri, with their ribs pushing out through their skin. They ranged in age from a slack-jawed toddler to two boys in their early teens. One, the smaller of the two, had gone on ahead and slipped beneath one of the market stalls: the one selling fresh water. She watched as he retrieved a length of rope from his pocket and looped it around the stallholder's ankle, securing the other end to the leg of his table.

She liked these boys.

A boy of about Rukia's age darted forward, snatched one of the flagons and made a break for it back the way he had come. She caught a flash of his red hair and bare feet as he raced into the alley on her left.

"Stop! Thief!" The shopkeeper went after him. In so doing, he pulled over his table and upset ten or fifteen more flagons of clean water. The child who had been beneath broke cover like a fox, striking out in the opposite direction to the first. He snatched up another of the flagons as he ran.

It took the stallholder less than a minute to free his ankle. The air was blue with his swearing and, all around him, figures hunched in doorways or lying prone in the street, glanced up from their reveries, disturbed, perhaps, from dreams of a living world. The trader took off after the first boy, but, as soon as he was gone, the others swarmed over his wares.

Rukia knew the rooftops better than she knew the alleyways. She was on her feet and following their progress through the streets, leaping from one building to another. This was her domain and she was sure-footed no matter how discordant the architecture of Inuzuri. Here, a roof thatched from bamboo; here, a mere lean-to of corrugated iron, and here, a flat balcony of stone and slate.

The pack of boys was coordinated. Their separate lines of flight led them back towards each other, converging in a wide alley that was otherwise deserted. What they hadn't counted on was, perhaps, the persistence of the shopkeeper who had followed the red-head easily through the crowds. When it was clear to her that he must catch at least one of them, Rukia slid down into a narrow space between two houses and waited.

The boys came tearing past, spilling water as they ran. She was going to have to time this just right.

She sprang out of the opening just as the shopkeeper came charging into view. He ran headlong into her, tripping on her legs and she watched in delight as he went flying, only to land face down in the dust.

The boys had faltered in their flight, staring back in awe at their saviour.

"Run, you idiots!" she yelled. She jumped onto the stallholder's head as he tried to raise it, slamming his face back into the dirt. The boys needed no more motivation than that. They ran.

She remained, perched atop her fallen enemy until he remembered himself enough to start flailing at her. Then, unlike the others, she escaped by shimmying up the nearest wall as if the laws of gravity need not apply to her.

She had no intention of being caught.

She was like lightning over the rooftops. Experience had taught her that you could never run too far. Many times, she had gone to ground, hidden herself amongst discared crates and boxes, only to feel a hand close around her ankle. She had never grown used to the beatings that followed. So she was determined to stay one step ahead of the man on the ground.

The illusion of order in the centre of Inuzuri, its tumbledown geometry of houses and alleys, began to dissolve at its edge. Here, there were no houses as such. There were sheets of metal propped up by stone wedges. There were boxes and blankets and bodies in between. The very edge of town was reserved for souls that needed no food, no water and, seemingly, no shelter or protection. They stared at those who passed with empty, sightless eyes. For them, this was not a reality at all. Their hopes, their pleasures, their very minds belonged in the world of the living and all they had now were the shadows of their memories. Rukia slowed as she reached them; they had always scared her, those souls, seeming, to her, too much like empty vessels.

To her surprise, the boys were standing on the edge of the slum, their bare feet sinking into the mud. She jumped down to the ground. They turned towards her. Wary. A little hostile. The leader of the pack was the red-head. He was neither the biggest nor the eldest, but he was big enough and old enough and his eyes were, by far, the cleverest:

"What's your name?" he demanded as she approached.

Now that she had stopped running, the exertion caught up with her. She folded her arms across her chest, trying to steady her breathing:

"Rukia."

"You're from round here?"

"Yes."

"I've never seen you."

"Well, I've never seen you either."

He cocked his head on one side, appraising her, then seemed to make a decision. He jabbed one finger towards the slums:

"Mainly, we live out here."

"Here?"

"You have to go past this rotten area. It's a barn, or it used to be. It's where we hang out now. It's alright. Are you okay?" he added: "You look in bad shape."

"It's nothing. It's just" – she wondered how much she should tell him. People didn't tend to want to know she was different from them. Yet these boys had gone to great lengths to steal fresh water and that, in itself, was unusual – "I get tired," she admitted.

"Do you want to come back with us?"

"Renji!" cried one of the others in horror, as if his invitation had violated an unwritten code. The red-head glared at him:

"What?"

"She's a girl!"

"I get that. She's alright. Well?" He turned back to her.

"Do you have food?"

"Sometimes."

"Do you need to eat?" she asked. They glanced at each other and, suddenly, Rukia no longer cared what they thought of her. The most important thing was that she sate this hunger, somehow, anyhow: "Well, I need to eat," she told them forcefully: "So I have to know if you've got food!" Renji was looking at her with a mixture of surprise and wariness:

"Yeah, we've got food," he said,carefully. "So come with us, Rukia."


	3. Chapter 3

_**Author's Note: Hey folks, just to let you know, as of 1**__**st**__** October 2011 I've finished typing up the whole thing. If you're following it, please let me know if rate of upload is okay. Thanks!**_

_**Back to Rukia and Renji…..**_

Their path took them away from the worst of the slums, from the shacks half-sunken in a mire of debris from the town. It took them along the edge of a river that ran through the heart of Rukongai, then up a grassy hill. As night began to fall, they were climbing still.

"I'm tired," Rukia said at length.

Her steps were dragging. It was starting to rain and, as the first fat drops struck the ground, several of the boys giggled and took off up the hill. Renji had been hanging back, matching her pace, but she had slowed. Her head was pounding and, when she looked up, the lights of the city were blurring into one another, like wet paint. Renji caught her as she stumbled.

People didn't get tired here. They used the word sometimes, but it always meant that they were bored, or busy, or just lazy. It was different for her. She used it to mean an ache in her bones and a heaviness in her body that had not been there before.

"Hey, Renji!" One of the children cried. The rain was falling more heavily now.

Rukia lowered herself onto a boulder at the side of the path, as Renji shouted back:

"Go on ahead. We'll catch you up!" He looked down at her: "When did you last eat?"

"Two weeks ago. Usually it's no more than three days, but" –

-"The boats didn't come in. I know. I went myself to try and get supplies for us, but" – he shrugged and crouched down – "I guess we're unlucky. And I'm sorry, Rukia."

"For what?"

"I'm like you. I get hungry. I get thirsty. I get tired. The others too, but, uh, not so much. Anyway, I found out this much: when there's two of us together, it's worse."

"What do you mean?"

"Can't you feel it?"

She could. It was like a part of him rubbing off on her. When she closed her eyes, he was still there. Instinctively, she flinched. Now that she was aware of him, now that he was imprinted on her mind, she was suddenly afraid that she would not be able to escape him. "It's alright," he said, a little disappointed by her reaction: "There's not many of us, but there are some."

"Really?"

"Sure."

She thought hard, then asked:

"Do you remember being alive, Renji?"

He shook his head. The rain was coming down hard now and mud was forming itself into rivulets that swept down the side of the hill.

"Come on, Rukia," he said, taking her hand.

Not far from the path, there was a ruined house. It had been fashioned from branches and boards and had probably not stood for long because the roof had cascaded inwards, leaving only a skeletal shell. However, there remained sturdy foundations beneath, and Renji led her along the side of the building to where a hole led down into the earth beneath the structure. It looked like the entrance to a rabbit warren. He slid in, feet first, and, after a moment, Rukia followed.

The walls down here were made of stone and, most importantly, they were dry. Rukia could stand, but Renji had to duck his head to move about comfortably: "You looked like you could use a rest."

"Im fine. Really."

"Seriously, you look kind of sick." He padded to the far side of the basement: "Anyway, we can hole up here while it storms. We've still got a way to go. Unless you really want to carry on."

He had the better of her. She said nothing, but sat down on the dry floor and pulled her knees up to her chin. The kimono she wore afforded no protection from the elements. It was wet through, dark and tacky against her skin, and she was shivering visibly. After a moment's deliberation, Renji strode over to her and knelt down at her side. In one motion, which was rough, yet oddly self-aware, he flung an arm around her shoulders and pulled her into the crook of his body. She went rigid, but it took little effort on her part to realise that he was different to the leering men in the street who would wrap their arms about her waist if given half the opportunity. "You're fucking freezing," he muttered.

She could sense him and, in some small way, she could use that same instinct to guess his intentions and, finding nothing in him to doubt, she resigned herself to the fact that his body was warm wherever it touched hers. The lids of her eyes were suddenly heavy, and sleep came like an irresitable force. "This is a shit town," he was saying, and, though his words were rough, his voice was soft: "One day, I'm going to get out of here. All of us, we're going to get out of here."

But she didn't hear any more until he shook her awake.

In the dark, he moved away from her. She lay there, blinking, unable to see even her hand in front of her face. The sounds of the rain had stopped, but her body still felt stiff and she didn't want to keep walking. She wanted to lie there and sleep, even if it meant he left her in the cold. "How do you feel?" he asked, and, when she didn't answer, he added: "I think you need to eat something. Come on." His hand found hers in the darkness and pulled her to her feet.

He led her out into the silver-blue light of a clear and star-dusted night: "I can carry you the rest of the way," he said: "It's not a problem."

She turned briefly towards the town. From up here, it was impossible to imagine the cluttered, sweat-soaked streets or the mass of empty-eyed souls that walked those streets. There were only silvery lights as far as the eye could see, threading through the alleyways of Inuzuri and out into the other districts of Rukongai. Beyond them, rising like thorns from the ebb and flow of human souls were the white towers of the _Sereitei, _the domain of the death gods. Tonight, there were lights in those towers to rival the lights of Rukongai. From the gods to the beggars, there were lights enough tonight to challenge the moon and stars.

Renji was waiting for her. He lent down so that she could climb onto his back and, in such a way, he carried her back to the place he called home. A dozen beds, stacked one atop the other. Nearly twenty children. Supplies of food and fresh water, which he shared with her. And then she slept. And that was her first night in a place that would become her refuge for the next thirty years.


	4. Chapter 4

_**Author's Note: For Renji and Rukia as children, the image I used as inspiration is a picture by Irishgirl982 on Deviantart called "C'mon Renji" and it shows the two of them out in the countryside of the Rukon. Thank you to those of you who are following this story and double thanks to the fantastic people who are following this series; namely: Shadewolf7, Truantpony, ForbiddenME, Pink357, Immortalvows, Chellythemadhatter and Insomniac95, sallydestroyerofworlds23, UNTensaZangetsu, XDArk FangsX, Superlynx, BobTheSexyTurtle, .Love, Ennaalemap and Makaykay15. And thank you also to those of you who have left reviews, favourited or messaged me. And, finally, thank you to anyone who is following on the quiet.**_

Many of the children refused to venture into Rukongai. Those that needed to eat and drink, and there were a few, relied on raiding parties who went into town for provisions and clothes. Renji's was one of these groups and a successful one at that.

At first, Rukia was happy merely to stay in or around the shack. When Renji returned with candy or water or fruit, he would always give her a share and, on his advice, she took to eating and drinking every day. The sustenance made her stronger.

In the evening, if Renji was willing and not too tired from the day's exploits, the two of them would venture into the foothills of the Rukon, up amongst the farms and vineyards to the high, secluded places that she had found when she was just a small child trying to run away from life in a hopeless town.

One afternoon, they brought back sweets covered in sugar cane. Rukia perched on the end of one of the beds and picked at them; the sweetness tasted like fireworks exploding in her head. One of the older boys tried to take a bag of them from the smallest child in Renji's gang and, when no-one went to stop him, she stood up.

He took the measure of her; she was half his height. Slender. No match for him. He laughed. And that was when she sprang at him. Her kick knocked him to the ground and she landed on his chest like a bird of prey, unthinkingly wrapping her hands around his throat, squeezing until he bleated out an apology.

It was the first time she'd had to fight since Renji had found her, and it frightened her that she had done so without thinking.

She stepped off of the prone boy, stared at the tears running down his face, and fled the shack.

Of course, Renji came to find her.

The sun was setting over the _Sereitei _and the sky was filled with amber light. The white towers of the Court of Pure Souls seemed grey against the horizon. Renji very nearly ran straight past the tree where she was hiding:

"Rukia! Rukia!"

"I'm here!"

"What are you doing?" He whirled and saw her sitting on one of the branches: "Where did you learn to fight like that?"

"Where do you think?"

"You're good, you know. For a girl."

"I know," she said. She was.

"Are you okay?"

"Yeah. I thought I wanted to be alone, but" – she laughed. There was something absurd about wanting to be alone when she could never be so again. Not while Renji was alive. She could feel him. His life. His soul.

"You're weird," he said.

"You're the weird one."

He grabbed her ankle and pulled her out of the tree. They landed in a heap. She didn't want to have to fight, but it was second nature out here, even in play. She and Renji scuffled together in the long grass. He was bigger and stronger and he bruised her easily, but she never let it show. He had never treated her as if she was any different from the others, any different from him. No more delicate. No more fragile. She was the only girl. Girls didn't survive in Rukongai, she knew, so she was grateful that Renji was oblivious of their differences. Briefly, he held her at arm's length where she struggled and scratched at him. He was grinning: "You really are weird." He didn't mean it, of course, or, if he did, it didn't matter because he wasn't going to leave her. For either one of them to part from the other now would feel like tearing themselves in two. And that, she believed, would never change.


	5. Chapter 5

Inevitably though, things did change. Inevitably, they grew up.

Renji's gang were the lucky ones. They looked out for one another. Some of the other kids just disappeared, left the shack one day and never came up, but they were the survivors. Years passed and they watched the town change and grow, new roads flattening old houses, new dwellings engulfing the slum, creeping steadily upwards into the green hills of the Rukon.

They were no longer children, but nor were they adults. They were old enough and big enough to no longer be easy targets and, from the hill where they lived down to the edge of the river, they had earned their reputation and their territory.

It was late afternoon. Renji had spent the day carving a shaft of wood into something resembling a spear for fishing and now they were sloping along the edge of the river at the rolling pace of youths with nowhere to go and nothing better to do. Hayate was jumping in and out of the water, splashing the others who charged up and down the beach as if they were their own tide, while Renji, out in front, had his head down, dragging the spear, so that it drew a line in the mud behind him. He barely glanced back as Hayate capered past him, then chased the two youngest boys up the steep bank.

Their progress was impeded by a pile of debris on the bank. They all climbed up and over the detritus, like rats through garbage, except Renji who had paused at its pinnacle and was squatting, staring at something on the water's edge. Rukia paused and looked back:

"What is it, Renji?"

"A corpse, I think." Immediately, the youngest boys rushed back, overcome with macabre curiosity. Hayate remained, standing beside her. He yawned and wiped the sweat out of his eyes, disappointed to no longer be the centre of attention. And Renji was still squatting on his mountain of rubbish, carefully prodding his find with the butt end of the spear. That was how it was. They were not above stealing from the dead. Far from it, if it meant food or water for them, or something else they could trade for sustenance. Life in Rukongai was about being the one who was alive at the end of the day.

"She drowned!" Kenichi, the youngest, shouted back to them. He seemed thrilled. Rukia rolled her eyes:

"Who cares? We were going fishing!" As she finished speaking though, there was a ruckus amongst the boys and all but Renji sprang away, sprinting towards her through the mud. Renji had fallen backwards, nearly head over heels:

"It's alive!" he cried, causing an avalanche of rubbish and flotsam as he regained his feet and slip-slid down the pile of garbage to join the others. His corpse had sat up and was watching them resentfully. As Renji came bounding past, Rukia stared at the woman; just another soul, possibly one that was barely self-aware because how else would she have found her way out here to become just another piece of rubbish washed up by the river? Her eyes met Rukia's for a moment, making her wonder just what it would be like to live that way. Then Rukia turned and sprinted after her friends.


	6. Chapter 6

Sunset saw them fishing, undisturbed, in the Rukon River.

Rukia had tucked her kimono up around her thighs and waded out into the current, while Renji followed behind with his spear hefted across his shoulders. It was summer and the water was warm, but Hayate and the other boys watched them from the bank.

"There's one! There, Renji!"

She shifted her body as a silvering fish swam past, her motion forcing it towards Renji who lunged at it. He struck the water in a half dozen places, lashing out wildly before losing his footing and disappearing under. Rukia nearly fell backwards herself, laughing: "Idiot! You won't catch it like that! You'll scare them all away!"

Renji straightened, his hair slick against his neck, his ragged clothes soaked through. He glared at her, then turned a look of exaggerated concentration on the water.

But Rukia was disracted.

Floating downstream from the city were a host of blossoms, their petals dusted with drops of water that glinted in the sun. In the middle of all the chaos that was Rukongai, its alleys that overflowed with mud, sweat, and the casual violence of its citizens, the floating blossoms seemed, to her, almost too beautiful to stand. With a cry of joy, she waded deeper and cupped the closest one in her hands. It was white. The petals sparkled as if each were encrusted with a thousand diamonds: "Flowers!" she cried, beaming back at the boys.

All six of them had frozen and were staring at her. She had only a moment to wonder why before Renji coloured suddenly and she realised that he was staring too. Except it wasn't at her. It was at the image of a girl, the shadow of a woman, standing bare-legged in the river against the setting sun. The light had caught the outline of her body through the thin _yukata _she wore. No-one had ever looked at her that way before.

Renji turned and waded back to the shore. He climbed out of the water to where the other boys were standing, gawping, and brought the flat edge of the spear round in a powerful blow that struck across their stomachs and knocked all but Hayate and Hisoka off their feet. He straightened, looking slightly proud of having defended her virtue, and she started to laugh.

The moment was gone. The other boys started to laugh as she waded back to shore and she joined them, surrounded by their noise and their jostling.

Renji dived back into the water and swum out among the blossoms. She watched him with her chin on her knees.


	7. Chapter 7

People in the Rukon lived for sixty or seventy years. After that, so it was said, they returned to the world of the living. An endless cycle.

Rukia wondered, sometimes, if her own life was the beginning of one of these cycles and if that was the reason that she had no memories of a time before it. But there were other differences between her and the souls in Rukongai, some more subtle than others. One was that she and Renji and, to a lesser extent, their friends, were aging differently to the other citizens of Inuzuri. The years, it seemed, refused to touch them.

At first, there was nothing strange about it. For the first twelve or thirteen years of her life, time passed for her as it did for everybody else and the days, months and years marked her body. But, after that, there came a change. A slowing down. At first, it went unnoticed, but, by the time she was able to count out two decades of her life in living memory and still see only the reflection of a thirteen or fourteen year old girl in the river where she fished, then she was forced to re-evaluate. Kenji, Kenichi, Hisoka and Dai, the four boys who had been younger than her in Renji's gang, began to outpace her, growing into men while she remained, for all intents and purposes, a child. She could only conclude that, for reasons unknown, she and Renji were trapped outside the cycle of souls. She had never lived and she would never live, but her existence would continue for an eternity, scavenging among the slums of the Rukon. The vastness of that eternity, which she knew in her heart could be shattered only by an unnatural end, haunted her at night. She never shared her fear with Renji, although she wondered if it was the same for him too, and her only comfort was that she would not spend that eternity alone.

It was autumn and a rumour was spreading through the streets that a man from Inuzuri had been called to the Court of Pure Souls.

"A boy from Rukongai set o become a death-god?" said a voice in the crowd as Renji and Rukia pushed their way through.

"He was always such a good boy," said another.

Renji's gang were foregoing their usual hunt for food to indulge in an afternoon's entertainment. There was an air of opulance and mystery surrounding the death-gods and to see one would certainly be worth a day without food. Still, Rukia had become very dependent upon nourishment and she was finding it hard to ignore the groaning hunger in her stomach. She tripped as she ran. Renji called back:

"Are you alright?"

"Yeah. Go on ahead. I'll catch you up."

He vanished into the scrum of people as she picked herself up and dusted herself off. Hunger made her clumsy. She jogged on, cursing under her breath.

She caught up with Renji and the others outside a house like any other in Inuzuri. It was fashioned of tumbledown mud-bricks and straw, with a door that rested at least as much on the floor as it did on its hinges. Yet, parked outside was a palanquin honed from the most exquiaite black wood, polished and varnished to a finish so smooth that it reflected an image the crowd who stood around it. Rukia, who was used to seeing only a distorted reflection of herself in water, stared along with the rest of them. She didn't know what she had expected, but she was still surprised to see a child staring back at her: a child with a woman's eyes, but a body so small and thin that it looked as if it would break like a china doll.

Beside her, Renji reached out to touch the polished wood. No sooner did his fingers brush the surface than a man in a black cloak stepped forward from behind the palanquin:

"Don't touch that, you brat! Get away! All of you!" He clapped his hands and the children sprang away to a respectful distance, just as the door of the shack opened and a young man stepped out.

He looked as out of place as the palanquin in the dusty street, but he leant back into the house to kiss an elderly woman on the cheek and, from where she stood, Rukia could see that the woman wore rags, just like everyone else in Rukongai. The man, however, seemed to her to have come from another world.

His skin was clean. His eyes were sharp and far older than his years. He wore a sword on his hip and the black uniform of a soul reaper and, as he stepped into the street, Rukia's world slid out of focus.

Renji caught her as she fell.

She became aware of his arms around her waist and chest, holding her up, and shielding her, too, from the black-clad man who had first reprimanded them and who had now stepped forward with a kick aimed at Rukia's head as punishment for her having fallen towards the palanquin. He was stopped, however, by a word from the soul reaper:

"Don't."

It was all that Rukia could do to pull her vision into focus. She could see now that there were differences in the way the two men were dressed. The nearest wore a plain black robe with an _obi _of the same material. His face was angular and weathered.

By contrast, the death-god was ageless. His _obi _was white, as was the _juban _he wore beneath his _shihakusho. _As he stepped closer, she felt her breathing tighten and Renji, too, stiffened. She could feel his heart beating against her back, his arms holding her with an urgency that made her realise that he, like her, was unable to run.

The _shinigami _dropped down on one knee before them and fished something out of his bag: a little cotton package. He took something from it and held it out so that Rukia could see it. It was a fairly unassuming ball of rice. He pressed it to her lips: "You must be hungry," he said. When she hesitated to take it, he added: "It's alright. Being hungry is the sign that you have strong _reiatsu, _like me. Your body reacted to my spiritual pressure. That's okay. If you eat you'll feel better. Here, have these – for both of you."

Renji relinquished his hold on her just a little to take the bag of rice balls, even as Rukia swallowed the first, barely having tasted it. All she could focus on was the _shinigami. _She could feel him, in the same way that she could feel Renji. Well, perhaps they were a little different, but it was that same sense of presence. If she closed her eyes, if she moved away, he would still be threre. His imprint, though similar to Renji's, was many hundred times more powerful.

Soul reapers were otherworldly beings. They could travel between the realms of the living and the dead, but the only thing Rukia truly understood was the awe and fear they inspired in the people of Inuzuri.

Rarely seen in the streets of Rukongai, save on the checkpoints between districts. They were considered a grim portent. Where the _shinigami _stepped, it was said, demons followed. No-one could match their swordsmanship. They were the rulers of death in its many forms, but they were respected too because they brought order where there could or should be no order: in the violence of murder, in the throes of disease, at the bedside of a loved one; they made sense out of what was senseless.

Rukia did not understand the connection between herself, Renji and the _shinigami, _but she had some notion of _reiatsu, _the spiritual pressure that the death-god had mentioned. _Reiatsu _was the source of their power.

Was it possible, she wondered, that it might be the source, too of hunger, of thirst, of agelessness?

When the _shinigami _was gone, leaving them sitting in the street with the prize of their rice balls, Renji explained to her what he knew of the _shinigami. _ It was little more than her, but he had heard of a magic they possessed called _kido._ By focussing _reiatsu _into a desnse point, he said, it was possible to manifest energy: light, heat, motion. He wanted to try it. Indeed, over the next three days, it became his obsession. And, at the end of that time, he succeeded in creating a single, tiny orb of red light.

Rukia was troubled by this new interest of his. The three days it took Renji to discover one of the first and simplest forms of _kido _were three days in which she and the others got by on a minimum of food because Renji's fascination with his powers afforded them no time to scavenge. They had found a place, a dead end alley, which was distant enough from the hubub of town to mean they went undisturbed, but also far enough from their own lodgings to ensure that the other children didn't see them. Rukia was sitting on an upturned barrel. The five boys who followed Renji everywhere were ranged about, watching him. Once more, the tiny red light flared into existence.

She had noticed a change in herself in these last three days. She had scorned Renji at first, thinking it would be dull to watch him straining over something he had no real knowledge of, but, from the moment he had begun to focus on his _reiatsu _with a pained look of concentration, she had noticed a difference in the sense she had of his presence. If she had been looking at the silhouette of a person, which was sometimes how she imagined him to be within that extra layer of her consciousness where she could feel him day and night, then the outline would have blurred and become shadowy. It poured into itself, like black sand. Yes, that was exactly it. The more she concentrated on him with her inner eyes, the clearer his presence became and the more she began to picture it as a shimmering, changing mass of particles, like sand or dust.

To create the light, whether he was conscious of it or not, he was forcing streams of those particles down the length of his arms. Where they touched his wrists, or the points where his wrists should be were she overlaying her inner vision on her outer, the dust motes cleaved together. From where they were densest, the power emerged.

After watching him practise this many times, she turned her attention to herself. She had never tried to sense her own _reiatsu _before. She didn't know whether it was possible any more than an eye swivelling in its socket might catch a glimpse of itself. Since she didn't know what to look for, she imagined herself as she had seen Renji, in her mind's eye: a shadow made of dust.

Nothing happened. She tried to imagine the dust shifting, but she could feel no connection between the images in her head and the sense of her own body. Disappointed, she closed her eyes and tried to shut out the murmurs of the boys around her. There was only her and that shadow. Except the shadow was her. She pushed her consciousness forward, into the image, imagining it folding around her, enveloping her and streaming through her.

Pieces of her thought had substance. She felt them snag her and, in the same instant that she believed she could open her eyes and find herself surrounded by that whirling black dust, her vision filled with light.

There was no darkness here. The energy was pure white and cold.

All this time, it seemed to her, she had been seeing the world inverted. She was not a child. What she had taken as reality was the illusion and everything that she had perceived as a shadow was suddenly filled with light.

The rest was effortless.

The energy flowed down her arms and into her hands. Her palms felt cold. When she opened her eyes, a sphere of light hung just above the tips of her fingers. Its edges were transparent, like glass, but its centre was almost too bright to look at, as if she had somehow trapped the light of a star. It was, she thought, the most beautiful thing she had ever seen, as broad as the span of her two hands beneath it. She gasped in delight.

The boys, who had been watching Renji's attempts and offering praise or encouragement as was appropriate, whirled to look at her. There was a stunned silence and then the small crowd erupted with cries of amazement. Renji's eyes were wide and round. She had the small pleasure of glimpsing his face that way the instant before he scowled and looked away. And she laughed. She hadn't meant to compete with him, but it was hard for her not to enjoy his envy.

"Ah, Renji," cried Dai, turning back to their nominal leader: "You could be _shinigami. _Are you and Rukia going to become death-gods now?"

Rukia answered for him:

"I don't want to be a stupid death-god. I want to stay here with you guys." She sprung off the barrel and turned to look once at Renji's face; there was disappointment there, but relief as well and she knew, from the shouts of the other boys, that she had made the right decision. Without waiting to see if Renji would answer for himself, she took off down the alleyway, hollering, and the others came after. He could either stay there with his damned _reiatsu _or he could follow her for a change.


	8. Chapter 8

Those were golden days; they were days when she was never alone. They had the safety of the shack on the outskirts of town to return to every night, and one another's eyes and ears at times when the Rukon seemed to brim with violence. Thugs still owned the streets and murderers slunk in the shadows. Yet, while they protected one another, it seemed to her that their cares had melted away. She understood now what she was, what she and Renji were, and she wasn't afraid anymore.

But the Rukon was without pity.

The town began to encroach on their stronghold. It happened over years; the slum shifted, more buildings were erected, while the old shack fell into ruin and the children slept either between its crumbling stones or in the grass behind its broken walls.

She was no longer a child now though. She was a grown woman and no longer content to sleep on the ground.

She took a vacant house not far from the old shack. When it rained, the roof leaked and, in summer, the walls rotted, but it was shelter nonetheless. The others too went their separate ways, trying to find their places in an adult world. Suddenly, she was alone again.

They tried to meet every day, usually down on the banks of the river where they'd always gone to fish, but years of watching others backs and having her own watched for her had made Rukia forget how dangerous the streets of Inuzuri really were.

Within the space of a year, the numbers who met on the riverside dwindled. Kenichi and Dai disappeared without a trace. Kenji was murdered for the coin he carried. Hisoka was killed in a fight. News reached Rukia and Renji only after it was too late. Splitting up had been inevitable, in the end, and she and Renji had always been the strongest. Inuzuri was merciless on the weak.

One night, she went down to the river and Renji wasn't there.

The city was burning. There was a fire in Seventy-ninth, which had spread from one house to another until it seemed to her that all of Rukongai would be devoured by it.

She was certain she would know if anything had happened to Renji and yet, when she returned home that night and sat alone in her house, listening to the shouts outside, news of the devastation in Seventy-ninth being passed from one person to the next, she was still afraid. Beyond the tumult, there was the sound of the wind in the rafters of her house. She closed her eyes and tried to imagine a world in which Renji didn't exist.

So, when a knock sounded at her door, she started up, wrenched it open, and flung her arms around his waist. He was much taller than her now. Her head rested on his chest and she could hear his heart thudding through the coarse tunic he wore. He half-embraced her, half-pulled her back into the room so that he could close the door on the smell of smoke outside.

She knew before he spoke that he brought news of Hayate, the last of their friends. He had been missing for a week and Rukia had known, in her heart, that he was gone.

There was a space only for a bed and a table in her dwelling, so Renji sat with her on the bed, one arm around her shoulders, holding her just tightly enough that she could feel the tension running through him.

"He's dead," he said.

"In the fire?"

"No. Killed. I don't know why. Maybe someone's idea of fun."

She shifted against him:

"We shouldn't have" – she started, but, without looking at her, he interruped:

"Don't say it."

"It's true."

"No, it would have happened anyway. It was always going to end like this."

She looked up at him. He was staring hard at the darkness outside her window and something in his expression made her lower her voice:

"When did you start to believe that?"

"When Kenji died," he said: "When you didn't cry." He glanced down at her. She had never shed a tear for any of them. Until now, she hadn't been sure that he had noticed. She felt a wash of shame and stood up, turning so that he couldn't see her face. She didn't know if he would understand or if she could even begin to explain why she felt so cold inside. It was as if the emotions that drove the rest of the world, the world in which souls circled in their endless dance of life and death, could not take root in her. She was a point of stillness at the centre of it all. It was a place without fear. She was stronger now than she had ever been, had no reason anymore to fight for her survival. There was no fear of death now: no aging, no fading, no deterioration or decay. Just her own existence. In the face of eternity, the idea of mourning one loss, one death, seemed petty, absurd even. She had no right to it. "This place," Renji said suddenly: "It was just a bit too harsh for us all to make it through."

Stilling the emotions in her face, she returned and sat with him on the bed. He put his arm round her again.

That night, for the first time since the night they'd met, she slept again in the crook of his body, both of them still dressed in the clothes of the day, having talked long into the night and fallen asleep with more unspent words on their lips. When she woke in the hours before dawn, they were side by side like lovers; his arm was bout her waist, his hand resting on her belly. She could feel him breathing against her back and could hear the soft sound of morning rain tiptoeing across the roof. The fire had not come and destroyed everything in the night then. Life, it seemed, would carry on and yet, as she lay there, she knew that something was ending and something else had begun.

That day, after the rains dried up, the sun came to scorch the city, drinking in the humidity in the air and leaving it to hang across the streets of Rukongai in a gauzy brown mist.

They buried Hayate in the morning, while the air was cool. Three graves, marked by piles of stones and wooden staves, now stood on this secluded outcrop in the foothills of the mountains. Rukia had discovered this place when she was still a child, accessible only by a treacherous path cleaving to the edge of a sheer cliff. There had always been peace and solitude here, and all of Rukongai stretched out beneath her. She had gazed at it for hours back then, just a slip of a girl with her chin resting on her knees. She had gazed at the city and at the white towers of the _Sereitei _beyond. She had not guessed, back then, the sequence of events that would lead her here again, time after time, carrying the bodies of her friends.

The air was dusty over Inuzuri today, the diamond clear river a stark contrast to its shadowy streets. She stood on the very edge of the outcrop, the wind snatching at her hair and the sash of her _yukata. _Beyond Rukongai, those white towers blazed against the sky.

"Renji," she said: "Let's become _shinigami." _Her voice was soft: "If we do, they'll let us live in the _Sereitei. _I've heard it's comfortable there. Let's become _shinigami _and let's go to the _Sereitei."_

She felt him approach and then his hand touched her shoulder:

"Yeah, let's become _shinigami."_


	9. Chapter 9

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